Telegraph iPlayer pick: Amy - My Body for Bucks (BBC3)

In keeping with BBC3’s tradition of salacious programme names, last night’s documentary about one single mother’s attempt to fund herself through college was called Amy: My Body for Bucks.

The title was misleading. This wasn’t a film about prostitution, or even the sex industry. It was about how hard it is to afford further education. But that would have sounded a great deal less sexy.

Nineteen-year-old Amy did go to a lapdancing club three times a week, although by the time she’d paid the £15 weekly retainer and the night’s fee of £85 for the privilege of dancing there, she didn’t get many bucks for her body. Her profit on the night the cameras followed her was £15.

Still, she balked at doing soft porn or escort work. So she slipped further into debt, exhausted by child care, her studies and sheer survival.

This distressing film was the first in a short season of programmes that BBC3 are showing on the theme of lost innocence.

The funny thing, though, about Amy was that, despite being left by her daughter’s father four months after giving birth and encounters at the club that made her hate men, she remained remarkably childlike and naïve.

Witnessing the making of a porn film reduced her to the giggles and she thought a job as a hostess at an after-show party for the Brit Awards would be her doorway to fame.

“Somebody could change my whole life tonight,” she mused. “An agent could pop in and tell me you’ll be perfect in my theatre production of… I dunno… Barbie.”